LIST OF PANELS

The aim of this panel is to investigate and develop a better understanding of how different community and public health and social systems have responded to the needs of the most vulnerable populations and document key lessons that can improve systems' sustainability and resilience, especially in charting a recovery path from the COVID-19 pandemic. A progressive transition from pandemic response to recovery will require a renewed focus on building sustainable, resilient health and social systems with a renewed focus on equity as the pandemic has widened the equity divide. The pandemic has been characterized as a health, social and economic crisis resulting in mass unemployment, increased impoverishment, and exacerbation of longstanding racial, gender and health inequities. The disproportionate impact has been most felt by vulnerable groups like refugees, asylum seekers and migrants without status, elderly people, those with ill health and comorbidities, or homeless or under-housed people, but also, more broadly, socio-economically marginalized people who have been struggling to cope financially, mentally, or physically with the crisis. To reduce the vulnerability factors experienced by the most marginalized populations, the public and community sectors need to engage in joint coordination efforts called intersectoral collaboration. This collaboration ensures holistic care provisioning, inclusive of health and psychosocial support, addresses food security, as well as educational and employment assistance.

The COVID-19 pandemic has indeed underscored that coordinated action across sectors is vital for addressing the underlying drivers and determinants of health and social inequities and for building stronger and more resilient communities beyond pandemic realities. New interventions were launched in the context of the health crisis to reduce inequities through an intersectoral approach, to improve coordination in service planning and delivery. This panel focuses on learning and documenting intersectoral collaborations and their innovative potential at the local/municipal, provincial/state or national level to generate a responsive policy response and focuses on the following questions:

-       How are different community and public health and social systems addressing the widening gaps in equity at local, regional, state/provincial and national levels?

-       How have the needs of marginalized populations been taken into consideration to develop responsive services?

-       What have been the innovative and promising practices that have promoted citizen participation/engagement?

-       What have been new and emergent collaborative governance processes and practices that encouraged trust creation and redistributed power to guide open innovations?

-       How have new intersectoral partnerships emerged and developed in order to exploit opportunities and prospects for resilience and sustainability?

The panel welcomes papers that focus at different levels- local, regional, provincial or national level or draw a comparative perspective to discuss and learn from different settings and offer solutions and contributes to knowledge systems for policy, societal and academic debates. The overall aim of the panel is to advantage knowledge on what equity-focused COVID-19 responses look like at the local, regional and national levels and highlight feasible and tangible actions that can be taken to promote sustainability in health and social systems responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This panel will offer the opportunity to bring together people with different disciplinary backgrounds and professional experiences to share and disseminate their research findings, and key lessons learnt. In order to address the above research questions, the panel welcomes papers from different disciplines like (not limited to) health policy, social policy, public administration, and health management and across different sectors (health, social and community) with different focuses (theoretical, empirical). The panel welcomes papers based on primary and secondary data and literature reviews.

Contributions could focus on areas like (but not limited to) the following:

-       New collaborative models of governance to develop an intersectoral response to the pandemic

-       Measuring the impact, utilization and appropriateness of new policies and programs to serve vulnerable populations

-       Community mobilization and engagement to improve health systems’ responsiveness

-       Interventions to reduce stigma and develop culturally appropriate response

-       Roles, relationships and coordination between different stakeholders 

-       Rationale and development of the decision-making process

-       Measuring population health outcomes and health inequalities  

This panel will provide scholars, policymakers and practitioners from different regions with the opportunity to share, discuss and deliberate about the rapidly evolving health and social policy ecosystem and systems responsiveness for the most marginalized populations to the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the panel will focus on collaborative innovation in either developing new policy instruments or developing newer practices of partnerships and collaborations to strengthen the system response.